


All That Glitters

by wynnebat



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Historical, Archaeology, Egyptology, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Historical Inaccuracy, Multi, Polyamory, Post-World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-06 01:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15875370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat
Summary: It takes Pidge six hours, an empty bag of falafel, and a headache from reading the hieroglyphics etched into the walls only by torchlight, until she finally says, "I was right."





	All That Glitters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meru/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this fic, meru! <3

It takes Pidge six hours, an empty bag of falafel, and a headache from reading the hieroglyphics etched into the walls only by torchlight, until she finally says, “I told you to be careful.”

Wolf bares her teeth at Pidge on Keith’s behalf, but Keith himself is out of reach of her torch’s light. His voice echoes from somewhere on the other side of the hall. “Your exact words were _I can_ _’t believe Matt got me a death trap for my birthday, what a good brother_.”

“I didn’t mean for you to get _caught_ in the death trap!” she immediately replies.

“And I didn’t mean you had to run after me.” Keith’s voice sounds closer now.

Pidge turns away from trying to compute the tales of men and gods on the walls into something that reads like a way to escape from this place, and toward Keith’s voice. She still can’t see him, her torchlight only stretching a few feet, but she can see the sea of treasure that this room holds. It makes perfect sense that it would be stringently guarded, unfair as it is that her team has been caught up in its protections. The hall is grand and beautiful, piles of gold and treasure and _history_ , but none of it will mean anything if they’re trapped here forever.

When Keith finally appears, there is a layer of sand coating his hair and smudges on his cheeks. Pidge has seen him dressed up and down, sparkling clean and covered in swamp water, and she can honestly say that there’s nothing that can possibly make him look unattractive. Even that scowl on his lips threatens to put a smile on her own.

“I couldn’t just let you go into a death trap alone,” Pidge tells him. “Who would get us out?”

“Shiro,” Keith easily replies, sitting down on a gold-plated chest.

Pidge wants to be insulted, but Shiro is a force of nature when his friends are in danger. Pidge tried hard not to fall for him, not to rely on him as thoroughly as Keith does, but it had been useless. Slowly, the more they traveled over the past two years in search of clues to ancient civilizations, the more Pidge felt as though Shiro’s presence is simply a calculated attack on her heart by the forces of the universe. She’d survived the war only to fall to love.

It’s made her silly, all of this.

But then, twice the love, twice the silliness, and not falling for Keith had never been in question. Pidge sits down beside him, resting her torch in a heavy gold chalice. Before pride can get in her way, she says, “I’m glad you’re alright. It’s better to be here with you than worrying about you from the outside.”

“Shiro’s going to kill us both,” Keith mutters, shaking his head and glancing toward the stone wall that had lowered from the ceiling, cutting them off from the rest of the tomb. The two other exits had been similarly blocked.

She and Keith had spent the first two hours trying to move the walls before determining that it just isn’t in the cards. Pidge is going to carry some pocket explosives everywhere after this. The rest of their time, they’ve wasted searching for another way out or a convenient lever to pull and trigger the wall’s mechanism back to its rightful position. It’s only been six hours, but that’s five hours longer than Pidge has ever been trapped anywhere, and it makes her nervous. It’s easier to think about Shiro. (It’s always easier to think about Shiro. She and Keith have probably had the very same daydreams.)

“We’ll appeal to his good nature if we ever make it out,” Pidge offers. “I’ll bat my eyelashes at him.”

Keith groans. “Please, don’t.”

“ _You_ could bat your eyelashes at him,” Pidge says. Lightly enough for it to be a joke, but only just so. Her love for her two boys is a sapling compared to how long Keith has loved Shiro. They’d known each other for longer than Pidge had known either of them; they’d gone to war together, joining the ranks of pilots in a land not their own. After the war, they’d sought out the young woman whose feats of engineering had been of such great help during the war, and Pidge spent months perfecting a leather and metal contraption for Shiro’s arm.

And when Pidge left to seek out a mystery that has haunted her through her entire life, Shiro and Keith followed. Through jungles and deserts, canyons and tombs, here they are. (Here they are: two stuck in a golden cage, one stuck outside and likely out of his mind with worry.)

“He doesn’t want me batting my eyelashes at him,” Keith replies, reaching out to run his hand through Wolf’s fur. Then, to bribe Pidge from speaking further, he reaches into his rucksack and passes her a bottle of water.

She takes it gratefully. If they’re truly going to be trapped here until a miracle arrives, they need to conserve their resources, but she isn’t going to die of thirst doing so. Her throat is dry, the water a marvel like none other. When she places it back in Keith’s bag, she sees the blade sitting at the bottom, innocently teasing at her with all of its secrets. She plucks it out and turns it over a few times, slipping the leather sheath from the blade and staring down at the symbols in the metal. The same symbols that she’d spent her life trying to prove aren’t native to the several Egyptian sites they’d been discovered in. Academics have relegated the mentions of the Galra to a traveling tribe, or another name for several Egyptian gods, or a strange myth.

Pidge doesn’t know what they truly are, the Galra.

Or rather, she’s already thought odd by so many people, brilliant but strange. She doesn’t dare voice her thoughts until she has proof.

To Keith, the search for the Galra is more personal. Keith is the only one who she hadn’t had to convert to believing in the existence of the Galra. He’s had a blade ever since he was young, one too precise to have ever been created with current technology and bearing the same symbols Pidge has seen in certain Egyptian writings. Somehow, one of his parents must have left this inscribed blade to him before his childhood memories began in the orphanage.

“We’re not going to die here,” Keith says, his hand enclosing hers around the handle of the blade.

When Pidge meets his eyes, there’s something there in the shadows cast by the torch’s light, in the way he looks at her like that light could burn the world as long as she is safe. In her more hopeful moments, Pidge thinks that maybe, it’s the same way he looks at Shiro. It’s something, Pidge knows, something that hovers on the edges of their campsites and their consciousnesses.

“I know. I promise,” Pidge tells him. If there isn’t a way out, she’ll make one. She hadn’t died during the war and she refuses to die in a place where her family would never be able to uncover her body. And she won’t allow Shiro to mourn them. There are very few things that could drive Pidge’s attention away from Keith’s expression, but there is light in the corner of her vision. There is no light source other than their torches in this place, but no proper light source would cast the inscription on the blade in a purple glow. “Keith, _look_.”

Keith slips his hand off of hers in surprise. The blade stops glowing until Pidge hands it to Keith. In Keith’s hand, it renews its glow with vigor. The purple glow reminds her of nothing but the symbols the Ancient Egyptians used to indicate the Galra.

Keith stands, holding the blade in a firm grip. When he speaks, it’s both to Pidge and to the blade. “What now?”

At the center of the room, a chest begins to glow. Pidge doesn’t walk, she runs. Under her frantic hands the object loses its initial appearance. She removes the dust and sand from the top, then along with Keith she removes a layer of rock. What they find is machinery unlike anything she’s ever seen. Pidge is a genius and wartime had been a time of frantic innovation, but this? It’s a display that couldn’t have been from the present or the past. It’s something strange, different, and Pidge’s heart beats fast in her chest.

It’s a sign of the Galra, a civilization whose existence she’s spent her life trying to prove.

“Let me try something,” Keith murmurs. He gives the blade to her for safekeeping, and instead places his hand onto the machine. It lights up in colors and symbols, all a deep purple, and Pidge can’t speak for the delight she feels.

She won’t call it magic.

But it’s something, something foreign and different and _otherworldly_. There is no other explanation for the fact that the star charts at the corner of the screen span an impossible distance.

“They really did come from the stars,” she breathes. She leans into Keith, who’s warm and stable as he stands next to her. Keith, whose parents knew something about this. Who, according to her most fanciful theories, may have come from the stars themselves.

Keith smiles crookedly. “It’s not the stars I care about right now. Think this thing can raise the walls?”

It’s all he has to say before the sound of moving stone echoes through the chamber. Pidge has never heard anything so wonderful.

Pidge grins with utter joy. She squeezes Keith’s shoulder for a moment as she yells, “We’re free!”

She takes a few steps toward the nearest exit, not intending to leave Keith and Wolf, but needing to see the outside. Needing, if she’s honest, to see Shiro striding inside and not trapped somewhere himself. When Shiro steps into the light of the nearest torch, his face is a study in relief, and he reaches for her just as she reaches for him.

Still, there’s a tenseness to his gait that makes Pidge ask, “Are you angry with us?” For not waiting, for rushing in, for leaving him alone.

“I’m furious,” Shiro replies, but he’s not pulling away, he’s leaning down, and he’s—

Oh, there are lips pressing against hers, and two arms around her, one that she already has a partial claim to as its creator. And perhaps she has a partial claim to the rest of the man, too, because he kisses her with more passion than this dusty chamber has seen in thousands of years.

“You’re something, alright,” Pidge says as she catches her breath. But her mind catches up to other parts of her quickly, and she releases Shiro to look back at Keith. “Keith...”

“One of us was going to eventually,” Keith says, not looking at either of them.

And he’s right, of course, but Pidge had been so certain that one of them would have been Keith, and the other Shiro. Factoring in how long they’ve known each other and the way their lives have orbited each other’s. Shiro had Adam, once upon a time. Shiro doesn’t talk about it at all, while Keith has a million things to say when he’s drunk and moody and Shiro is absent.

 _One of us was going to,_ Pidge thinks, glancing between the two of them. It’s a selfish thought that’s fluttering through her head, but she didn’t survive the Great War to not be selfish. “What if it’s not just one of us, but three?”

Her boys are too smart to not know what she means. Under the torch’s light, there’s a red to Shiro’s cheeks. Pidge pulls Keith along with her as she walks up to Keith to meet his lips.

“What about it?” she asks. It’s a challenge, a dare. It’s love, as simple and complicated as it is.

“Keith wouldn’t—” is all Shiro gets out before Keith proves him wrong.

Shiro may have a self-sacrificing streak, but Keith and Pidge will happily be the devils on his shoulders. She meets Keith’s eyes and smiles. With the two of them, Shiro won’t be able to pull away.

Not, as the expression in his eyes seems to say, that he’ll ever want to.

There is history and mysterious foreign technology aplenty in this place, but Pidge has all she needs right here. Her two boys.

And Wolf, of course.


End file.
